The present invention relates to a system and a method for archiving and supplying documents using a central archive system.
Conventional archive systems are generally closed systems. Closed systems of this kind have interfaces for importing documents and searching for them. Links with other archive systems are confined to the intake of documents plus index data. As a result, the administrative and configuring tools available within the archive systems are purely system-related.
Where there is only one archive system being used within a company, the facilities offered by the system are generally adequate. The administrators have only one system to look after and the users are familiar with the end-user interface. In practice, however, it has been found that in companies of any size there is generally more than one archiving solution in use.
Where there is more than one archiving solution in use, possibly on different platforms, it becomes increasingly difficult for the company to administer all the systems, to obtain an overview of the document holdings which exist within the company, and to provide end-users with easy access to these documents. The last point is a particular problem because, where there are several systems, the end-user has to know how to operate all of them.
A natural development of individual archive systems is a central archive system that can incorporate other archive systems irrespective of their platforms and producers. The advantage of a central archive system is that, because it will fully incorporate a large number of individual archive systems, it gives a complete picture of the document holdings which exist within a company. A system which can be cited as an example of a central archive system which provides this facility for incorporation is the Enterprise Document Management System (EDMS), commercially available from IBM Corporation. The essential features of a central archive system that can incorporate different individual archive systems are:
1. A central index to many different document management systems and decentralized servers, irrespective of the platforms they use.
2. Ability to process large volumes of data.
3. Harmonized view of all documents irrespective of where they are stored.
4. Total flexibility of indexing and thus total flexibility for search enquiries and document requests as well.
Where a central archive is going to be used, it has to be embedded into the existing infrastructure of a company. This is particularly true of end-user applications (end-user interfaces), which can differ widely from company to company or even from division to division within a company. Rigidly fixed search facilities in the form of hard-wired search applications and search windows which exist in some conventional archiving systems do not simply restrict the widespread adoption of central archives but in fact virtually rule out their use in practice. To provide the maximum possible flexibility, it would be necessary to have interfaces which, as far as their functionality is concerned, provide every possible facility for search and document requesting applications which matched to the company""s needs. Since central archives are usually only employed in companies where there are a very large number of people using them, an interface of this kind needs to be a server component which accepts search/document requests from users as clients and passes them on to the central archive for processing, as shown in FIG. 1.
An interface of this kind, which will be referred to herein as a front-end server, should also be available for as many platforms as possible. Where there is a front-end server of this kind (as there is in EDMS), then it can be used by the company to handle accesses to the central archive from company-specific user interfaces.
FIG. 2 shows a central archive to which external archiving systems are connected. The index of the documents present in the external archiving systems is stored in the central archive. Special access programs tailored to the external archiving systems enable the document requests made to be handled by the central archive.
A company-specific search application adapted to the front-end server is used by an end-user to make searches in the central archive. The search request is accepted by the front-end server and passed on to the central archive for processing. The central archive makes the search and passes the result back to the front-end server, from where it can be collected by the company-specific application. The end-user selects the documents he needs to look at and asks the central archive for them. The latter finds that the relevant documents are in an external archiving system and in turn asks the external system for them. Once they reach the central archive, the central archive passes the documents on to the front-end server, from where they can be collected by the company-specific application.
Document-request handling of this kind can be seen as a basic function of central archives. The disadvantages it has are that:
a) By reference to the data held in store, the central archive must recognize that the document requests it has are for documents whose index is stored in the central archive but which are themselves stored in an external archiving system.
b) The central archive must contain data on where a document request has to be passed on to or which triggers a request to the external archiving system in question.
c) The central archive must accept documents supplied by external archiving systems and pass them on to the front-end server.
d) For each external archiving system, the central archive must have a program for handling document requests or a program of this kind must be implemented to connect in the external systems.
Generally, a method and apparatus are disclosed for archiving and supplying documents using a central archive. If it is assumed that the individual external archiving systems belonging to a company were procured before the central archive system, then for each external archiving system the company will already have a mechanism for directly handling document requests. According to an aspect of the invention, once a list of the results of a search has been supplied, then the central archive can be bypassed and the particular external archiving system involved can be accessed directly.
The object of the present invention is therefore to provide a simplified method and system for supplying documents by using a central archive, which method and system avoids the disadvantages mentioned above.
The present invention relates to flexible facilities for supplying documents where the index to the documents is stored in a central archive but the documents themselves are stored in an external archiving system.
The solution according to the invention is based on management of the addresses in the external archiving systems which is performed at the central archive. The approach adopted supports the specifying of any desired number of backup servers and, by allowing the configurable supply either of the address relation itself and/or of server address information attached to the list of search results, it provides a facility which supports the full range of document supply capabilities available when a central archive is being used.